EDirect Documentation

This documentation reflects EDirect version 7.00, released on 07/10/2017.

We strive to keep this documentation up-to-date with the latest release. If you are looking for documentation on a more recent version of EDirect, or to find out more about new EDirect releases, please see the Release Notes of NCBI's EDirect documentation.

The EDirect package includes several commands which use the E-utilities API to help you find and retrieve PubMed data. In addition, EDirect includes a handful of commands which can help you extract, process, and work with the data you have retrieved.

elink: Uses the ELink utility to look up similar, related, or otherwise connected records in the same database, or linked records in a different database.

Three EDirect commands do not use the E-utilities API:

xtract: Extracts specific data from XML and creates tabular output, based on your custom specifications. Note: The xtract command is very flexible and customizable, and has many options, so we have broken the documentation into several pages: